The Darkened Temple: Occultism and the Midnight Movie
The cinema has always resembled a rite. How the occult revival of the 1960s found its way onto the screen, and how the midnight movie made a congregation.
The Hidden Picture: How to Read Esoteric Art
Some artworks are said to conceal a secret doctrine. A field guide to esoteric readings of modern art, with six tests for telling a discovery from a projection.
Voices in the Static: Spiritualism and the Machinery of the Dead
Spiritualism arrived with the telegraph and has tried every new machine since as a line to the dead. On seances, spirit photographs and voices on tape.
The Ages of the World: Esoteric Histories of Rise and Fall
Some esoteric traditions say we have fallen from a golden age, and others say consciousness is climbing toward a higher one. A primer on both stories and their meeting point.
Nigredo: Alchemy and the Uses of the Black Phase
Alchemists held that nothing could be perfected until it had first been allowed to rot. A short history of alchemy, read through its darkest stage.
Satanism: A Field Guide to Four Different Things
The word covers an accusation, a literary pose, a godless philosophy and a small family of genuine religions. Most confusion comes from treating them as one.
Grimoires: A Reader's Guide to the Books of Magic
What a grimoire is, how one is put together, why so many claim to be by King Solomon, and how historians read a literature designed to be feared.
The Left-Hand Path: Antinomianism as Method
A term borrowed from Indian tantra, used as an insult by Victorian occultists and later worn as a badge. What the left-hand path means, and why the label is slippery.
Chaos Magic and the Do-It-Yourself Occult
In the late 1970s a handful of English occultists threw out the robes and the claim to ancient truth, and kept only what seemed to work.
How to Read a Fringe Religious Movement
The word cult ends thought. A working method for describing small, new and marginal religions, and for recognizing real danger.
Gnosticism and the Prison World
An ancient family of myths held that the world was made by mistake, that its maker is not God, and that something in us remembers a better place.
Hermeticism: An Orientation
Who Hermes Trismegistus was supposed to be, what the Hermetic writings actually say, and how a Renaissance dating error changed European thought.
The Western Esoteric Tradition: A Map
Hermeticism, Gnosticism, alchemy, Christian Kabbalah, Rosicrucian manifestos, occult orders: what connects them, and how the currents run into one another.
Nothing of that kind is shelved in this room yet.